Content or social media curation is a fancy term for sharing things with your followers / audience.

This is something that almost all users of social media do almost every day.
If you create content; write a blog, create memes, take photographs, make videos, sing songs, etc., the chances are that you do not have enough content to keep your audience engaged with you. So you do what I, and most everyone else does; you share the interesting things that you come across that are in roughly the same space as your content is with perhaps your own thoughts on that content to give some perspective as to why you are sharing it.

What you do not do is the following:

Steal

I really can’t believe that I have spell this out but given some events recently by people who really should know better I guess I do.
If you download a photo, or image, and then re-upload it, without attributing it to the person who posted it first, its theft. Plain and simple.
Yes, all content creators should brand things they create, or otherwise assert their rights as the owner of the material, but failing to do so is not a license to steal.

What makes matters worse is when you go to great lengths to brand your own content and assert your own copyright, but still do not see the hypocrisy of stealing other people’s work.
And of course, just rebuilding a meme using your own image and then trying to assert copyright over that phrase or image is just theft of a different type. Just ask Scott Stratten about the fun he had with “You are not the Jack Ass Whisperer.”

For those confused about copyright and trademarks, I wrote about them here.
If you do want to share something that does not have a watermark or any kind of attribution and you are on a social network that makes directly sharing difficult, Instagram comes immediately to mind, then just ask. It’s the nice and friendly thing to do.

Click Bait

Recycling content, and then spreading it across multiple pages to increase page views and therefore sell more advertising is click bait. It is a real problem on Facebook. If you are creating content with this in mind please stop. If you are clicking on these articles please stop. And for the love of god, if you are liking these sites please stop. It is the equivalent of a magazine in the checkout aisle.

Linkjacking

Linkjacking covers a multitude of sins, but is generally cross posting from one social network to another via a 3rd party website to create traffic for the 3rd party site. Ignoring the generally agreed upon “bad form” of sharing from one social network to another to one side, linkjacking is again just stealing traffic off of the back of someone else’s work.

Newsjacking

Also known as: “how to ruin Twitter.” Newsjacking is the habit of companies to insert themselves, usually via #hashtags, into news stories to promote their brand. The most awful examples of this are companies that just randomly pick whatever is trending on Twitter or their chosen social network and insert those hashtags into their post in order to generate more views without even checking to see if those hashtags have any relevance to their brand whatsoever.

If there is something in the news that is relevant for your brand and you have content that may help provide context to a story then, of course, use the hashtag – that is what they are there for. But to leverage the news, and potentially the misery of others to sell things, is just wrong. And should be wrong in anyone’s book.

Content Farming

Generating articles purely with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind just so that your site can rank higher in Google should obviously be seen as a self-limiting strategy. Who is going to trust you if your articles are terrible to read? Generate good content and it will be shared. Sure, pay attention to good SEO practices, but if that becomes the reason you are writing something, you are writing for the wrong reasons and anyone who reads what you have written, or published to your site, will know it.

Being ethical about how you use social media is not hard. Social Media is about being social. It’s easy to steal content. It’s easy to film a speaker at a conference and then turn that into a blog post and not to credit them – it is still theft. For most people who create great content, and I like to think I’m one of them, we want it shared and to be seen by as many people as possible.